While Casey Hudson was muttering about BioWare possibly switching priorities to less… Well let’s not mince words, less BioWare games, others at Bioware were busy justifying ME: Andromeda’s failure in some pretty daft ways.
Mark Darrah, the director behind Anthem held an interview with the Game Informer and while it’s genuinely good and informative, some things piqued the interest of fans. Interestingly, BioWare’s Andromeda came up. When Mark was asked whether he thinks the game was given a fair chance he blamed the crowded landscape of RPGs at the time for Andromeda’s failure, specifically Breath of the Wild.
He later on went to Twitter to explain himself further though of course by that point it was a bit too late and “How ’bout it came at the same time as Zelda?” was already a sound-bite. Though he did admit that the opposite could be said about Dragon Age Inquisition, which was recieved so well at least in part due to Witcher 3’s delay.
And while that’s true, the unfortunate fact is that Andromeda was a big departure from the usual BioWare’s quality of storytelling with poor characterization, lack of consequences and sometimes rather glaring plot-holes.
The lack of any meaningful reason to ever create a new character Mark admitted to and relegating “the Strider” to being the story-hub likewise doesn’t bode well for the game’s narrative element.